[EM] Why We Shouldn't Count Votes with Machines

[Raph Frank]

On Thu, Aug 28, 2008 at 12:00 PM, James Gilmour
<jgilmour at globalnet.co.uk> wrote:
> Here in Scotland there is a somewhat "hidden" debate that must be had.  STV-PR was introduced for local government elections in
> 2007.  The counting rules adopted (Weighted Inclusive Gregory Method for consequential transfers) make electronic counting almost
> obligatory.  (Manual counting to WIGM rules is possible, but long and tedious because so many ballot papers have to be sorted and
> counted again and again.)  So we used scanners, OCR conversion and e-counting.

That is similar to Abd's ballot imaging suggestion.

I assume that the images used for the OCR aren't made available to the public?

> The Scottish Government is promoting further use of
> STV-PR for various directly elected bodies.  This is raising issues about the long-term provision of the equipment necessary for
> e-processing of the ballot papers for all these different public elections and about the software that will be used for scanning,
> OCR and counting.

This can be solved by just publishing the ballot images.  This way
everyone can work out their own result.

> Concerns about "black box" processing have been somewhat muted so far, but there have been calls for all blank
> ballot papers to be subject to individual adjudication by the Returning Officer under scrutiny of the candidates and their agents.
> This is an example of the ridiculous double-standards that are being applied to e-processing, because straightforward blank ballot
> papers would never be subject to Returning Officer adjudication in a manual count.

A blank ballot is one that has no writing on it, or one that is not used?